The Next Generation
by pagepixie66
Summary: After book NOT movie. Rated R for violence and language. Morticia, the moth-queen, struggles with the pieces of her father's broken banner.
1. Ash

Everything centers around Him. My mother, Marla, calls him Tyler, which is not his name, or she just says "Him" and I understand. He told me, once during another of His rants, that our fathers are our basis for God. In my opinion, they're both nuts, but maybe that just proves his point. Last time I tried to find out what His name was, many years ago when I was still optimistic, like his doctors, He said He didn't have one. He calls me Angel, but my name is Morticia. He's crazy, completely bonkers and guilty of several horrendous acts, but the doctors say He's harmless now so He's allowed to live in a state mental hospital three blocks from our apartment. Every week, Marla and I visit my untitled father. It's like a custody battle between us and the state, and we are the tired fathers scrambling for child support.  
  
Marla worries. Her face explodes into a thousand wrinkles, and she always wears the same faded black silk dress, a wide black hat, and emotion-proof sunglasses, like a mourner. She chain-smokes straight through all the nonsmoking signs in the hospital and sneers at the hospital assistants who asked her to stop. He says that she's changed. I don't know what she was before.  
  
I'm not an interesting person. I'm not worthy of having television shows or books written about me. Not even a TV movie could stoop down to the level of my unremarkable life. Then again, I take pride in the fact that I'm dull as dirt. I don't need to hope for all the wonderful things that will come to me when I'm older. Unlike everyone else at my high school, I know I don't have a bright future, just a long and boring one, and that's okay with me. Even if I worked my ass off for the next several years, what would be the point? I don't have any career interest or praise-worthy talents so I'd probably end up as a secretary for some old man with too many sexual harassment cases in his record. No, wait, sounds too exciting, a real up for all those masochistic, drama-addicts. (Why does the TV channel for women always show films of them getting beat up?) I'd probably just get stuck in the purgatory of middle management. I can already see the old coffee rings, papers filled words of no importance, a Daffy Duck mouse pad next to my bolted down, virus catching Windows. Is this really what our human lives have become?   
  
School is boring, a miniature office, prep for the "real world." Everything is photocopied, labeled, white, and flat. The walls are white washed concrete and the first floor windows are barred. It's funny how school reminds me of His hospital.   
  
Kids are mean, smelly, hormonal. Maybe it'd be different for me if I were one of them, if I didn't separate myself with literature and God's-delight, a pack of smokes. I can't help it. Because of the way my mother smokes the things and our close living quarters, I've been addicted since third grade, hell, maybe even since I was born. I'll probably die of cancer at age thirty. Oh well, there are worse ways to go, I suppose. Some of those struggling kids I despised were making fun of a janitor in the hall. He gave me the willies. He was missing his two front teeth and had a weird scar on his left hand. It boiled up like a pair of plump, leather, chapped lips. He is about forty, tall, and lanky with gray brown hair, a big bald spot on the right side, and a limp. He calls me Ms. Durden (which is not my name) or m'am. I don't know his. I never asked. It's lunchtime, and I'm supposed to be in the cafeteria, but I steer away from that smelling place where the administration would have me herded with the rest of the sheep.  
  
They jeer at him for a full ten minutes, mocking his limp down the hall and worse. I watch silently, not caring enough to get involved.  
  
"So where'd you get so ugly, cocksucker?"  
  
ooooo... clever. Homophobic slurs.  
  
"The first rule is I'm not supposed to talk about it." The janitor finally says, grinning to himself. He stands military style, head up stomach in.  
  
Tension.  
  
Something about what he'd said struck a chord in me and I look up from the book I'm reading.  
  
"The second rule is I'm not supposed to talk about it."  
  
"Get outta here ya little fucks."  
  
It's a new voice, female, but more feminine than mine. She nashes her teeth at the little ones. They look at her, look at each other, and walk away. She made it seem so simple.  
  
My first glance at Samantha and I hated her, like I had never hated anyone before.   
  
She has the perfect lean muscle mass body.  
  
I hated her.  
  
Perfect smile.  
  
I hated her.   
  
Perfect smirk; perfect freckles; perfect voice.  
  
I hated her by three and three million.  
  
Perfect attitude. Enough to make you laugh at hate yourself at the same time.  
  
Put a gun to my head and paint the walls with my brains.  
  
I don't know how we became friends. Call it an accident.  
  
But not like when an extra bag of Cheetos drops out of the vending machine.  
  
Sam was like the kind of accident where you got hit by a truck.  
  
Hey. I'm Sam. What are you reading?   
  
Sigh. I raised the book to eye level.   
  
The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder. Neat Any good?   
  
I shot her a look that screamed "Go away!"   
  
Guess so. See you around.  
  
I grunted. Freedom.  
  
When I got home, Marla was putting out her cigarette in a pot of maccoroni and cheese. The pot was dirty.  
  
"Extra-flavoring?"  
  
She didn't even look up.  
  
"You wouldn't have wanted it anyway."  
  
I shrugged. For once, she was right.  
  
"You should have been an abortion."  
  
I shrug again. What do you say to that?  
  
She looked up at me and then back down at her cigarette.  
  
"Can I go do my homework now?"  
  
"Yeah sure."  
  
I walk through the kitchenette to the bed/living/dining room, the suite royale.  
  
There were two cots, one wardrobe, and a bathroom w/molding shower fixture, a curtain for a door, and a cracked wall mirror to my right. It had lime Bate's Motel faded tiles, blue/brown carpet, eggshell paint. The whole place smelled of smoke, microwave dinners, and general rot. Sounds of other people's TV sets turned on high volumes.  
  
I finished my homework and my book and turned out the light. Marla had left a couple hours ago. She worked as an assistant at a funeral home across town. I don't think she always went to her job, but that was her problem. I was sleepy.  
  
Knock Knock Knock.  
  
Two-thirty. Marla wouldn't be home yet. Anyway, she had a key.  
  
Knock Knock Knock.  
  
Two-thirty in two inch glaring numbers and someone's knocking on the door.  
  
Knock. Knock. Knock.  
  
Arg.  
  
I grab a bat as I slump through the kitchen.  
  
Who is it?  
  
Sam.  
  
Who?  
  
You met me at school. I helped that janitor.  
  
Oh.  
  
Pause.  
  
What do you want?  
  
Just let me in.  
  
I stand there staring at the door thinking, or trying to anyway. It is hard to focus on anything beyond a two-inch glaring two-thirty.  
  
I unlock the door's five locks that give the illusion of protection... like the bat in my hand.  
  
There she is, smiling with two rows of perfectly squared pearls.  
  
Hey.  
  
What do you want?  
  
I brought food and I movie.  
  
Don't have a TV.  
  
It's a projection.  
  
To the side of the door was an old projector on a wheeled cart.  
  
It's two thirty.  
  
She shrugs.   
  
I shake my head. Why the fuck not?  
  
"Come in."  
  
Sleep is overrated.  
  
She brought pre-made popcorn and a black and white French film with subtitles. I didn't watch the movie or eat the food because I was reminded of Persephone and her pomegranate. It didn't matter that it was my house. Sam had brought her own nightmare with her, a nightmare so unfamiliar I feared what would happen if she stayed and it with her. When it was over she returned to whatever shadow she popped out of and left me with a slightly raped feeling. I got back to bed at four thirty like nothing even happened.  
  
Marla never came home. I got a job downstairs in a grocery store to pay rent.  
  
But I saw her when I went to visit Him on Saturday. She was leaving just as I stopped in the front door, the revolving door, like a hilarious joke about the current state of our mental hospitals. We both stopped.  
  
You coming home?  
  
Do I need to?  
  
I think about this for a few moments.  
  
No.  
  
"Okay then."  
  
I'd like to say that I never saw her again, but that's not entirely true.  
  
I knew it was always about him. Not me, I was an abortion. An abortion at the sixteenth year mark. It wasn't that she was cruel or irresponsible. To her, I was just a little slug fetus.  
  
He was in a good mood today.  
  
"Hey Angel." He said and gave a little smile, or at least, it might have been a smile little if not for his face. He had two holes, one in each cheek. One, I knew, he gave to himself before he was commited. The other must have come from wherever his teeth went, whatever caused the rest of his face to look like bruised fruit.  
  
A hole in each cheek and you always have a jack o'lantern grin, an insane jack o'lantern grin.   
  
"My name's Morticia, Dad."  
  
Wasted words. Nothing registered on his sickeningly pleasant Kevin Spacey grin.  
  
If our father's are our models for God, where does that put me?  
  
Who's your father?  
  
You are.  
  
He shakes his head, "Impossible. Who? Where? When?"  
  
"Marla, I don't want to know, about sixteen years ago"  
  
"Marla had my abortion, " he laughed.  
  
I pretended that I didn't hear. If he could have selective hearing, so could I.  
  
"No Angel. No more games."  
  
I nodded and turned on the TV. No more wasted words. At least, The Simpsons were on.  
  
A phsychiatrist called Homer an abomination. He replied, " And its my enviroment's fault because..."  
  
I laughed, and after an hour, I left.  
  
Bye.  
  
He nods.  
  
He was gone when I came back next week. Not released. Gone. Escaped.   
  
I'd like to say that I never saw him again, but that's not entirely true. 


	2. Reflections

Every time I see myself in the mirror, I'm shocked by the reflection. Most people who feel this way are surprised because they forgot something about themselves. They forgot that they were ugly or fat or old or that same damned cowlick. I was shocked I had a reflection at all. Could I really exist and not affect anyone around me? I was a joke on the tree falling in the middle of the forest. If a girl lives alone in the middle of an urban wasteland and no one's around to know or love or see her, does she still have a face?  
  
"You're missing the best part."  
  
That was Sam. She'd moved in after Marla left. I needed someone to help pay rent so she got a job downstairs. She also bought food. I think that if she didn't I would have just slowly rotted away. I barely remember to eat food; how could I remember to buy it, too? She still woke me up at about two thirty every Friday to watch old movies on her projector, perpetuating the nightmare of her first visit with her insomnia, leaving me drained of my own existence so full and demanding was her own.  
  
I ignored her, focusing once again on that age-old philosophical question. Yes, I did have a face, but it wasn't such a pleasant one. I looked hollow. I had Marla's dark hair and eyes and blue white skin, unique, a picturesque piece of gothic daydreams, spoiled to pulpy gray matter by my father's penguin nose and thin, angry lips. I was moth-like with a forgettable plain face, but I was still there, and I had a creeping suspicion that it had something to do with my houseguest.   
  
I clicked off the light in the bathroom before I left. Didn't want to waste the electricity. That stuff cost money.  
  
Sam had taken to invading other things besides my home. Sh ewould park herself across the hall from me at lunchtime, continually going on again about one of her plans, her plans to join the circus or the mafia, or start a cult or something... to become smashing rock star crime fighting babes.  
  
"I'm not a babe. I have no intention of becoming a babe."  
  
"Are you even listening? We could really help people. We could be fucking superheroes!"  
  
She was always doing that. She couldn't see life for what it really was. I sighed painfully, a common form of exhaustion those days that went unheeded. Meanwhile that same creepy janitor was staring at me from just outside the school's side door.  
  
"Shit."  
  
"What?  
  
"Nothing."  
  
He had been fired a week before. Apparently he'd gotten in a fight with the school's principal... and hurt him pretty bad. I took no notice of the affair or any other student and teacher gossip. But with his cold eyes staring at me with animal excitement, I couldn't help recalling the information and being frightened by it. When he was sure he had gotten my attention (Sam's too, unfortunately), he opened the door and dropped a little slip of paper in. He smiled and limped down the steps outside.  
  
"What was that?"  
  
"Hmmm?"  
  
"Didn't you see that? He dropped you a note."  
  
"No."   
  
But Sam was already going to pick it up. She was never afraid of anything. Her courage was both naïve and admirable. She read the scrap.  
  
"Whoa. Check this out."  
  
It was a soiled, crinkled bit of paper with words written in a hurried hand.  
  
Fight Club 6687 West Ave Friday 10  
  
"You know what it means?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Let's go."  
  
"No."  
  
Sam looked angry and disappointed in me.   
  
"Come on... why not?"  
  
"Fight Club?"  
  
"You're just scared."  
  
Was she really trying to use some childish trick to entreat me to come?   
  
"I mean it. You are so fucking proud of being able to take care of yourself but you've never been in a fight."  
  
I scowled and opened my mouth to speak but she interrupted me.  
  
"Oh its so obvious. You're pale. You're brittle. You don't eat enough so you bruise easily. How could you fight?"  
  
"Why would I want to?"  
  
I found myself intrigued by her anger despite myself.  
  
"Because... what do you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight. 


End file.
